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A few months ago, I wrote -- okay, ranted -- about my decision to quit playing Words With Friends over what I see as its fatal flaw: the way it rewards random guessing over knowledge and skill. My breakup letter touched a nerve, and I heard from lots of other folks who think the insanely popular Zynga game ought to fix this glitch.

Well, sorry, folks. After talking with Paul and David Bettner, the brothers who created Words With Friends, I can regretfully report that there's no relief in sight. They like their game just the way it is.

"I don't think it's a problem to be fixed," says Dave."We always intended it to be that way."

By "it," he means the phenomenon of players submitting random combinations of letters over and over again until the game recognizes one of them as valid. Since there's no penalty for guessing wrong, players who use this tactic enjoy an advantage over those who don't. Humorist John Hodgman calls this style of play "spamming the engine" and deplores it; the Web comic "The Penny Arcade" dubbed it "The Brute Force Method."

The Bettners call it "plugging," and they have no plans to do anything about it.

"There's a lot of really good solutions if we wanted to pursue that," says Paul. "For instance, it'd be fairly straightforward to track whether a user was doing that, and if he tried to submit three times in a row and was denied, we could say, 'You've lost your turn.' We could even show you what your opponents had guessed.

"But every time we've come up with these ideas and talked about them, we've realized that it takes away a little bit from the framework that's contributed to the success of the app. We've tried to stay very focused on presenting a singular experience. It's a simple game. There's not a lot of options you need to worry about. You can just jump in and enjoy it right away."

Don't like it? The Bettners offer a low-tech fix: Agree with your friends to play by your own rules.